Can you lose a job because of your accent?

Most of us would never say out loud that someone sounds too working class, or too foreign, for a job. Yet the research shows that accents still open and close doors in Britain. Here is what we know, and what we can do about it.

Within a few seconds of hearing someone speak, we form an impression of them. We guess where they grew up, what kind of school they went to, and often their class and ethnicity. Those guesses then shape what we think about their intelligence, their trustworthiness and their competence. None of this is conscious, which is exactly why it matters.

What the evidence says

The Accent Bias in Britain project, led by linguists at Queen Mary University of London and partner universities, asked people across the UK to rate 38 accents. Received Pronunciation, the accent of traditional “BBC English”, came top. Birmingham came last, and Afro-Caribbean, Indian, Liverpool and Cockney accents were all in the bottom ten. The researchers point out that the lowest-rated accents belong largely to urban working-class communities and ethnic minorities.

These attitudes show up in people’s lives. In 2022 the Sutton Trust’s Speaking Up report found that a quarter of professionals had been mocked, criticised or singled out for their accent at work. Among senior managers from working-class families the figure was 29%, compared with 22% for those from better-off backgrounds. Three in ten university students reported the same treatment in education, and a third worried that their accent could hold them back.

The effect is not limited to work. In the United States, the linguist John Baugh telephoned landlords about advertised homes using different voices. When he used an African American or a Latino accent, he received fewer return calls and was more often told the property was no longer available, even when it was still being offered to callers who sounded white. He called this linguistic profiling: discrimination that happens over the phone, before anyone has seen your face.

Accent as a stand-in for race and class

Why do these patterns persist? Part of the answer is that accent is one of the last places where open prejudice still feels acceptable. Few employers would admit to rejecting a candidate because of their ethnicity or class. Saying that someone’s English “isn’t quite polished enough” or that they “wouldn’t fit with clients” sounds far more respectable, even when it amounts to the same thing.

Scholars of raciolinguistics, such as H. Samy Alim, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, describe how racialised speakers can be heard as deficient even when they speak in exactly the same way as others. The problem lies with the listener, not the speaker. Rosina Lippi-Green calls the broader belief that there is one correct, neutral way of speaking standard language ideology, and she shows how it is used to justify unequal treatment.

My own doctoral research looked at this question in a very different setting: attitudes towards the Arabic spoken by the nomadic Ouled Naïl in Algeria, and how those attitudes shape speakers’ perceived employability. The context was different, but the underlying mechanism was the same. A way of speaking becomes a shortcut for judging a whole community.

What does the law say?

Accent is not a protected characteristic in its own right. In Great Britain, the Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination on grounds such as race, which includes nationality and ethnic or national origins. Treating someone unfairly because of an accent linked to those origins may therefore count as race discrimination. Northern Ireland has its own equality legislation, including the Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997. In both jurisdictions, however, regional and class-based accents have little direct protection. Bias against a Scouse, Belfast or Black Country accent can go largely unchallenged. (I am a linguist, not a lawyer, so anyone facing this situation should seek proper legal advice.)

The good news

Bias is not inevitable. In the Accent Bias in Britain study, lawyers and graduate recruiters who rated mock job interview answers judged the quality of the answers consistently, whatever the speaker’s accent. Their ratings matched those of professionals who read written transcripts. When listeners focused on content, accent mattered much less. Of the five interventions the team tested, simply making recruiters aware of accent bias with a short statement worked best.

What can we do?

Employers can use structured interviews with clear criteria, score answers on content, and remind panels about accent bias before they start. Vague criteria such as “polish” or “cultural fit” are where bias most easily hides.
Educators can teach students that every accent is systematic and legitimate, and challenge the idea that some voices are naturally more academic or professional than others.
All of us can notice the first impression we form when we hear someone speak, and ask whether it is about what they said or how they sounded.

Asking people to change the way they speak puts the burden in the wrong place. The fairer and more effective change is in how we listen. I am now developing a project, Tongues and Skins, on how accent-based judgement affects racialised speakers in employment and housing in Northern Ireland. I will share more as it develops.